By Glenda Bartosh
We all know the uncle who delivers
the conversation stopper at the dining table when sliced tomatoes are served.
He looks the kids dead in the eyeballs and says, “Hey, Helen, what the heck are
ya doing serving fruit with the roast beef?” Amidst much giggling and
chortling, Uncle Buncle then goes on to insist that tomatoes are really a
fruit, not a vegetable, while all the kids are going, “Nah, no way!”
I kind of felt like one of those kids
again, pinned down by Uncle Buncle’s stare, when I researched strawberries for
last week’s column and found out that the achenes (pronounced ay-keens, accent
on the second syllable) — the tiny dark flecks most of us think of as the seeds
that dot the surface of the strawberry — are really the fruit.
An achene is a small, dry,
indehiscent one-seeded fruit with a thin wall. “Indehiscent” means it does not
open on its own at maturity (like some people’s minds I know — sorry), as in
the well-sealed, dark-coloured achene of a sunflower.
A fruit, by stripped-down definition,
is the ripened ovary of a plant. Depending on which dictionary you consult, it
must contain the seeds of the plant, it
can
include the seeds of the plant (but then how do we
classify zucchinis, or squash? Read on…), and it often includes the sweet
fleshy parts we normally associate with fruits. We have come by custom, not
necessarily fact, to call any juicy, sweet, fleshy bits associated with achenes
the fruit — including nuts and strawberries — and conveniently overlook the
complex botany of the matter.
But just to complicate things a
little more, strawberries, as well as blackberries and raspberries, are really
not berries at all; rather, they are brambles. Brambles are aggregate
composites of fruits, or a lot of little fruits bunched together. That’s right,
each one of those teeny juicy sacs — called “drupelets” (now there’s a good
name to insult someone with) — that make up a single raspberry is actually a
single fruit that is part of a larger structure called a “bramble”.
This term was much more familiar to
people from the Old World and those from a few generations back. “Don’t get
caught in the brambleberry bushes!” was a familiar warning to all and sundry
out picking wild berries. The term “brambleberry” is still used once in a
while, but mainly when referring to blackberries. Personally I always preferred
the made-up “beebleberry bushes”, which first came into my consciousness
reading a Little Lulu comic book. They continue to appear sporadically in other
invented worlds as a kind of trope for a silly, invented place, but don’t ask
me what they taste or look like.
On the whole, the mix-up over fruits
vs. veggies is entirely due to the collision between the world of science and
the world of cooking and eating. Rhubarb, for instance is the stem of the
plant, and so removed as it is from any semblance of an ovary, could never pass
in the fruit kingdom. It even flirts ominously with one of the prerequisites of
the classic definition of vegetables: the parts of a plant, such as the leaves,
stems, and roots, that are edible. But because we use it in making sweet
desserts, voila, it passes as fruit.
And while tomatoes are the fruit of
the plant, we primarily use them as “vegetables”, which really isn’t a
scientific term at all but one of cooking and eating and custom, also defined
as simply describing any edible part of a plant that is not a fruit. And that’s
something like defining Canadians as any North Americans who aren’t, well,
“American”, though a friend argues that anyone living in any of the Americas is
technically an American and we should start using the term as such.
As for the vexing tomato, its
confusing identity is lodged forever in a U.S. Supreme Court case from 1883
brought forth by three Nixes, a bevy of exporters, who questioned whether the
tomato was a fruit or veggie as tariffs were paid on the former but not the
latter. The court, surprisingly, ruled in favour of the tomato as vegetable,
which generated no taxes but was in keeping with common meaning and, some might
argue, common sense and set the stage for all time for Uncle Buncles
everywhere.
Another definition for fruit is “the
fertile, often spore-bearing structure of a plant that does not bear seeds,”
and here’s where things can get really interesting. According the Gourmet
Mushrooms’ website, the mushroom is a fruit, much like the apple, which really
isn’t a fruit but a “pome”, wherein the “fruit” is really the core and the
outside part (the carpels) is much like the strawberry, an enlarged juicy bit
we like to eat. Pears and quinces are also pomes; regardless, the term
certainly helps us understand how the French “
pomme
” arose for “apple”.
Wikipedia can shake up a few
assumptions and produce department managers with its explanation of “berries”:
the most common type of simple fleshy
fruit
; a fruit in which the entire
ovary
wall ripens into an
edible
pericarp
. Examples of
botanical berries include the
tomato
,
grape
,
litchi
,
loquat
,
plantain
,
avocado
,
persimmon
,
eggplant
,
guava
,
uchuva
(ground cherry), and chili pepper.
The fruit of
citrus
, such as the
orange
,
kumquat
and
lemon
, is a modified berry called a
hesperidium
; the fruit of
cucumbers
and their
relatives — squash, pumpkins, gourds, cantaloupes, and watermelon — are all
modified berries, ones called “
pepoes
”.
Mind you, Wikipedia allows that bananas, squash and pumpkins are “false
berries”, but so are currants, blueberries and gooseberries.
So now we’ve really crossed a line in
the garden sand — cucumbers and lemons are berries? And, a tomato is,
botanically speaking, a berry, too? Aren’t we going to have fun at the next
dinner table confusing a bunch of kids!
In the meantime, I don’t know what
you’re going to grab to eat, but personally I’m going out for a bag of chips.
Last time I checked they were still in the “snacks” aisle, and I haven’t
discovered one reason to categorize them otherwise.
Glenda Bartosh is an award-winning
freelance writer who will no doubt continue the agreed reality of how we sort
our fruits and veggies in the produce department and in our refrigerators’
crisper drawers.